Brief Encounter

True, there may not be much to be said for Head Over Heels, but one thing it can claim is that, with the scene of Freddy Prinze Jr. defecating while a gaggle of supermodels huddle together, hidden behind the shower-curtain of his bathtub, it has broken new ground for the ever-poopular gross-out flick. Perhaps in…

Steven Spielberg’s watchable but naïve and incoherent account of the revenge by Israel for the murder of its Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972

It’s not easy, being human. The older you get the more you understand this. It doesn’t get any harder, necessarily, but at some point, usually in middle age, you realize how hard it has been all along. Agnès Jaoui’s delightful film, Le Goût des Autres or The Taste of Others is about such an epiphany…

At one point in Proof of Life, directed by Taylor Hackford, Alice Bowman (Meg Ryan) — who, by the way, is the second movie heroine in a month to share my name — asks Terry Thorne (Russell Crowe), the hot-shot K & R (Kidnap and Ransom) specialist negotiating for the release of her kidnapped husband,…

Corny and over-the-top as Hollywood’s celebrations of the virtues of rural life as compared to urban used to be, at least the filmmakers usually gave the impression of believing in it.

I really wanted to like Mouse Hunt, which was officially directed by Gore Verbinski but unfortunately bears the hallmarks of the directorial style of Steven Spielberg, out of whose “Dreamworks” studio it comes. Every now and then, it is true, the skills of the comic duo of Nathan Lane and Lee Evans as the brothers…